I love the house, I hate the house

A fixer-upper can provoke a mix of emotions, especially when you're leaving a home you love

The current place is nice, but “it’s all house and no land,” our Dream House diarist says.

Photograph by: Abigail Pugh
, National Post

This, and subsequent instalments in this series, is the story of how my family and I work to find inventive solutions to create a dream home. We begin with our current abode in Toronto's Parkdale, which, though lovely, doesn't fulfill our needs. What we do need is not affordable, however, so we've rethought our realestate plan, and purchased what is a very un-dreamlike (but well-priced) house in a neighbourhood that appears to have everything. Will it be the one? This is our journey.

Our realtor is normally not given to rhapsodizing with his clients over the fair price they just scored. But in our case, he allowed himself a measure of surprised delight. Our offer was extremely aggressive, yet the vendors had signed back, and far closer to our figure than the asking price.

For our part, we swiftly moved from lowball impulseoffer mode to re-crunching the numbers to be sure we should go to our highest price and, should they accept, buy the house.

This next offer was highstakes. Neither of us believes in home inspections, and several of the architects who came to see the house later corroborated that with a giant gut job such as the one we planned, a home inspection wasn't worth the money. So there was no "our-inspector-found-some-knob-and-tubewiring" parachute clause.

When it comes to financing, my partner and I embrace the complicated but potentially money-saving option. We already had a variable rate mortgage offer on the table, negotiated months prior, just in case. It was good: prime minus 0.8% for five years, but it expired within three weeks.

So on top of the doubts about the unsexyness of the place, we had stress about losing this great bank offer.

But a spirit of adventure and curiosity still dominated the proceedings. All the media buzz about a hot market, and bidders sitting in idling cars throwing $10,000 increments around like pennies, has us relieved this one was controlled by fate. We either couldn't afford it, or we'd get a bargain, depending on the sellers.

(A listing I'd seen last fall, a few streets east of our new house, had scared and annoyed me. Only viewable for a few hours, on one day, offers must be made that same day, and no home inspection or financing clauses were acceptable. The house was on a busy, one-way street opposite a school, was 16 feet wide and in need of total renovation. There was less buyer protection than if one were buying a sandwich, and, according to the sell sheet, an "opportunity" at $699,000.)

I think the two-week closing we asked for to get our good interest rate was attractive to the sellers. They agreed to our price, even though it was $114,000 less than their asking price and $88,000 less than one they had been forced to reduce it to a few weeks earlier.

It was head-spinning. We had our house. Our dialogue, extended over the next few days, went something like this:

"Can you believe it? The street we love, the neighbourhood we love, that big backyard and a totally fair price?"

"But it's a box. And it's only two storeys. You could spend $20,000 on the landscaping alone. Wiring's got to be another 20. What about those windows? Another 40, easy!"

My mum is a fearless buyer, renovator and investor in all things house, so she was neither surprised nor alarmed. But then again she, entirely on a whim and after a boozy lunch, once bought a tiny, perfect cottage in rural France for less than the price of a car.

Overall, friends and family were pleased.

What can loved ones say when your current house is a dream home and your new one a dog? Maybe this, care of my friend Liz: "You are one hell of a crazy lady, and I say that with all due respect and admiration and love and inspiration."

The day the deal closed, and while our daughter was in daycare, we went straight from the lawyer to our new house. It was 4 p.m. and dark, and the wind was damp. The backyard, in freezing twilight, was patchy mud studded with thick twigs. The fruit tree was bare, the problematic garden shed much bigger than remembered, and the space suddenly much smaller than we had recorded. And, rather crucially, the house is a semi and therefore attached to its identical neighbour. Suddenly, this made the whole thing seem less an exciting design challenge and more a hopeless cause.

Indoors, we kept up a hopeful banter as we went from room to room, but to me the shaggy carpets and '80s wallpaper friezes didn't seem as sweet, nor as fixable, as they had upon pre-purchase viewing. The corridors felt narrow, the upstairs bedrooms crooked and the ceilings headgrazingly low.

But I wasn't feeling buyer's remorse because my mind was repressing dark thoughts. Instead, a kind of emotional damage control ran rampant: "We'll find temporary tenants on Craigslist while we figure this out." I compensated: "Without these lengthwise walls, the space will look super wide."

And I reminded myself, should we not develop love for the house - no matter how much of a change we made - we would sell, or rent it out renovated, and stay where we are now.

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